Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
I started college as a computer science major, after courses in Basic, Fortran and RPG( which was Report Program Generator not Role Playing Game as it now generally means) I changed my major to accounting. All those punch cards and computer lab time was not what I was thinking it was going to be. LOL. And we did all our own punch cards!
Nice to hear from you! I guess we share some history. I started taking classes in Basic as well. i told the story in the main body of my thread. Due to financial problems my parents had, I only went to UCLA for one year, Sept, 1959 to June,1960, then transferred to Cal State Fullerton. Five years later I went back to UCLA to take Basic in June, 1965, while I was working for McDonald Douglas.
I was absolutely blown away by the changes on the UCLA campus in only 5 years. In 1960, the campus still looked like a 1950's campus. The guys had flat top hair cuts or crew cuts and wore dockers type pants with no pleats and they wore Ivy League shirts. The women still wore skirts and blouses, no women were wearing jeans. It still looked like The Fonzi's era on Happy times or Travolta's era in Grease. Going back only 5 years later to do Basic, everything had changed. Most guys had long hair and beards and wore jeans and a T shirt, non of the women wore skirts, they all wore jeans, T shirts and sandals. Smoking was very popular on campus. The cooler people smoked at course breaks or when walking around campus. In 1960, no one to speak of was on street drugs but in 1965, many students were taking marijuana on a regular basis with a few taking more potent drugs than marijuana. It was like a different world!
I think that it was the old Grease type era all the way through 1963. JFK was in office, everybody loved him. Two events signaled the change in culture, one was JFK's assassination in November of 1963 and the other was the invasion of the British Rock Bands in 1964. first the Beatles and shortly arfterwards a lot of other British Bands, "The Stones, The Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, etc. Up until 1963, it was a continuation of the 1950's culture but in 1964, almost overnight, the culture shifted to a Woodstock type of culture. The speed of change was absolutely incredible. Of course this was California, where trends originated. California and New York were trend setters. Middle America didn't change quite as fast but every few years they would catch up with the latest cultural trends.
Well Bromo, how did accounting go for you. In those days they had FORTRAN for scientific applications and COBOL for financial type of operations. Basic was an effort to merge and update those two languages, or at least that is how I remember it.
For we, in the scientific part of the spectrum, California was the center of the universe in the 40's through 60's in aircraft and defense work except, perhaps, during WWII when most vehicles came from Detroit and went straight to the Military. When Kennedy started the Apollo Moon Program, California was the center of that program and it was booming with aerospace and defense plants. It was very easy for someone with a math-physics background to get a well paying defense job.
With Johnson taking office after Kennedy's assassination, NASA was set up in Texas and much off the aerospace work quickly dried up in California. I got layed off but Texas was calling, especially Houston, were NASA was based (right outside of Houston). I went there in June 1964. It was either that or be drafted. Most of us younger aerospace guys wanted to avoid the draft. The Aerospace companies in Texas were recruiting like crazy in California. FORTRAN programmers were in huge demand for the Apollo effort. I took a job and never did go into the Army. Looking back, I wish I would have spent my two years in the Service. I didn't serve my country and feel bad about that plus those who did serve now have a lot of aid and financial benefits as a result. The Government accepted working in Aerospace or any part of our defense industry as a replacement for doing Army or Navy training. Our skills were considered critical skills.
As far as the punch card days. Learning piano as a kid, I took typing in 8th grade and have excellent typing skills. I did a little of my own key punching on my own. On key punching, there were no male key punch operators, it was all female and about half of the women were young women in their 20's. It was easy to make friends with the key punch operators, a lot of them were interested in meeting guys who were Programmers or Engineers. In Houston, I dated a couple of key punch operators and I think I dated one at Mc Donald Douglas. Nothing ever came of those dates.
I just loved being a FORTRAN programmer! The only downside was waiting around all day for your program to come back. I was always assigned only one program at a time. Writing the program required an initial meeting with the Engineer. He would go over the program which he wanted written and tell me what kind of output he wanted. All programs printed out large quantities of numbers but there was also CRT, which stood for Cathode Ray Tube and that referred to the graphs which the computer could produce.
The engineer would give me a set of equations and then tell me what he wanted the computer to do. I usually spent 7 to 10 days writing a program. It was a lot of fun, I just loved it. It was very challenging but it required the skils which I was best at. In higher math I was not an ace; I could understand it but had not made it my own enough to be creative with it. In computer applications, I was a whiz, I did phenomenal programs for my engineers and made some friends along the way. It would usually take about 2 weeks to formulate a program and debug it. Debugging was extremely interesting for me. Murhphy's law was at work, whatever could go wrong did go run during testing out the programs. Eventually, I got so good at debugging FORTRAN programs that at Douglas, I was assigned the task of debugging all the other programmer's programs, if they could not debug it themselves. I had a real skill there and it commanded a pretty fair salary, maybe between $75 K to $100 K in today's money. I was only 24-25, Not bad!
The boring part came after the new program was running smoothly. All of these programs used what was called the Monte Carlo Method. A set of random numbers was generated by the computer and huge quantities of these random numbers were used to do computer simulations. Nothing was actually run in real time, it was all simulated! You might be called on to make a million trial runs, each run using a different set of random numbers, you would then get a bell shaped curve of results and from that curve, actual results could be simulated using probablity theory. The problem for me was the time lag involved. I'd work for about 2 hours preparing data to submit to the computer room and then wait around for 4 or 5 hours until the results of the run were returned to me. I then spent an hour or two studying those results and giving them to my engineer. I then submitted a new run based on parameters which he or she gave me. The next morning that cycle would repeat. I would supply tons of print out data and graphs to my Engineer. He would review all the results and then give me new input parameters for the next day's run.
We worked on the Moon Shot, for several years. It was a real interesting experience. I got to meet some really smart people. I am fortunate to have experienced that!!
In an 8 hour day, I was waiting around for 3 to 4 hours every day. That was the part that drove me crazy. Were they able to give me 2 programs to work on simultaneously, that would have solved the problem. Douglas solved that problem by appointing me as a Debug expert for all the other programmers. That made the job really fun. One other thing warrants comment and that was writing up a users guide for each completed program. I spent time on those write ups. The actual typing up of the user's guides was done in a secretarial pool of typists. They always did a fantastically professional job.
Lakey
